California Coast & Ocean

Traffic Drives Planning
State parks are created to protect the state's most valued natural and cultural resources forever--not until someone decides that the land is needed for something else. "I don't think that people who have paid their taxes for parks, and people who have worked hard over the years to preserve these parklands, intended them to be used as land banks for infrastructure projects," said California State Parks Foundation president Elizabeth Goldstein.

What, then, is the pressing need driving this proposed destruction of public parkland? In a word, traffic--a chronic concern in Orange County. Recent projections by the State Department of Finance show the county's population growing by 20 percent within the next 25 years, from three million in 2006 to more than 3.6 million by 2030. By then, Rancho Mission Viejo, a ranching and development company that owns 23,000 acres, plans to build 14,000 homes and five million square feet of commercial space in the region served by the toll road.

"[Foothill-South] has been planned for a long time to accommodate the growth in Orange County," said TCA spokeswoman Jennifer Seaton. "Traffic on I-5 is projected to grow 60 percent in the next 20 years." According to the TCA, relieving traffic on I-5 is the primary purpose of Foothill-South.

Orange County Supervisor Bill Campbell, who has served on the boards of the TCA and the Orange County Transportation Authority, said that Foothill-South is necessary to alleviate I-5 traffic but will not, by itself, solve the region's congestion problems. He said the County will also look at improving arterial roads and increasing rail service.

"There's no question that we need to solve traffic problems," said James Birkelund, senior project attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). "It's just a question of how we're going to do it."

Why not widen I-5 instead of cutting a new road through the state park? TCA's own draft environmental document, released in 2004 and subsequently revised, found that widening I-5 would provide the greatest amount of congestion relief--and would also do the least environmental damage of all the options studied, other than taking no action at all. The TCA concluded, however, that widening I-5 was not feasible because it would displace many homes and businesses and because funding had not been found for it.

The toll road's opponents contend that I-5 can be widened with far less displacement than the TCA claims, or even none, by using alternative designs. Follow-up studies commissioned by the California State Parks Foundation and other conservation groups concluded that a combination of widening I-5 by one lane in each direction and improving existing arterials is the most promising alternative for both congestion relief and minimal disturbance to the environment and nearby communities.

"They basically knew they wanted to build this road through the park," said Birkelund. "They never seriously considered the alternatives."

Some toll road opponents question whether Foothill-South would attract enough drivers to relieve congestion on I-5. They point to Orange County's financially struggling San Joaquin Hills toll road, which has not lived up to usage projections and was in danger of having to default on its bonds until it was bailed out by the Foothill/Eastern TCA in 2005. The bailout deal included a $120-million grant to mitigate future revenue losses to the San Joaquin Hills road due to migration of traffic to Foothill-South (see sidebar).

If the toll road is built, improving I-5 in southern Orange County could become more difficult and costly: a noncompetition agreement between the TCA and Caltrans requires the State to pay the toll road agency if it is forced to default on its bonds because of financial losses suffered as a result of future improvements to I-5 or other state roads, with some exceptions. The noncompete clause expires in 2020, Seaton said.

One thing in all this controversy that is not in dispute is that public transit was never considered as an alternative to the toll road. Seaton said that, as far as she knows, no new public transit projects are planned for this part of Orange County.